Cultural changement

I arrived to the United States of America without thinking that there was going be an enormous cultural change. Indeed, in France we are rocked by the American culture: television series, fast food, brands, etc. I thought that the United States of America were a kind of caricature of my society, because everything seemed to be bigger. After my 1st day spent to Raleigh, I began to qualify my opinion. The most striking thing was the politeness of people. Waiters, sellers and unknowns, always welcome you with the smile and ask you how you doing. It is the thing which seemed to me just a bit hypocritical at first because in France, people are used to being very kind only when they have something to ask you, but after one week past I can say that's not and it is about a peculiarity of the American courtesy. What appears to me as major cultural change is the sport. Indeed, there is a strong sports culture in the USA but the most amazing point it is that everybody is brought to go in for sport, even at high level. In France, the studies and the sport do not go often together. The French sportsmen who study have most of the time a very bad level because we have a rather stupid ideology: " the intellectual never uses these hands but only his brain ". Here in NCSU I was able to practise a sport which I love and which is not very developed in France, wrestling. I'm training now with physicist, biologist, and mathematician students who have university titles and trophies. What a surprise! It reminds me the Antique Greece. The Greek philosophers thought that the intelligence "logos" had to be consubstantial with the gesture / movement. Moreover this is why Platon, highly skilled philosopher participated to the Olympic Games of pugilism. It would be inconceivable today that a French boxer is a philosopher, but it is conceivable in the USA that a physicist is a wrestler. I find in this point that Americans are much more open-minded, and that Americans kept an intellectual virility. It is the first time I leave for a total immersion in a foreign country more than two weeks. I discover something that I wasn't used in France, the adaptation of myself to someone else. I noticed it by discussing with my new American friends. French people tend to the sarcasm and to the humour "second degré", and I often found myself in a situation where after made a joke my American friend looked at me of an odd look because simply he had not understood that I was joking. I tend to make a bit of jokes in the middle of a conversation with a tone which seems serious... It is important that I become aware of it. I wish at the end of my studies to work in the business negotiation. In the case where I shall discuss with an American, I know now that my language and my closeness must be adapted to avoid any misunderstanding and make that the conversation takes place in the best conditions. To live with Americans and more clearly in a different culture made me become aware of the fact that I was French. It means that it is me who are different and not the others as I tended to believe it. I noticed that in my arrived, I tended to have clichés. To think that all the Americans were stupid and big. I was in a posture of rejection. Today everything is different. I pay more attention on the qualities than to the defaults and it means a lot to me to adapt me to be able to be integrated by the Americans into this new culture. I feel that this experience makes me grow up, take me conscience of the greatness and the diversity of the world. And at the end makes me better.